Researchers risk becoming political prisoners in Indonesia

January 1 2003

The jailing of Leslie McCullough and Joy Lee Sadler sends a sharp message from the army: keep out of troubled regions, writes Damien Kingsbury.

The five-month jail sentence for Australian-based academic researcher Lesley McCulloch in Indonesia has sent a clear signal that the Indonesian military's tolerance for what it regards as foreign interference in domestic issues has ended.

McCulloch was sentenced on Monday for violating a tourist visa in Indonesia's troubled province of Aceh in September. It is the first such sentence handed down for a foreigner in Indonesian legal history.

McCulloch's associate, Joy Lee Sadler, an American nurse, was given a four-month sentence for the same offence. The pair have been under arrest since September 11.

In one sense, the five-month sentence given to McCulloch and the lesser sentence for Sadler appear a compromise. The Indonesian military, the TNI, had pushed the prosecutor for McCulloch to be charged with the far more serious offence of possession of military secrets. In the end, both McCulloch and Sadler were charged with violating a tourist visa, which can bring a maximum five-year sentence. And the prosecution, in the end, only asked for nine months in each case.

However, of the dozens, probably hundreds, of people who have been arrested for allegedly violating tourist visas in Indonesia - usually for associating with separatists or other political outcasts - all but one have simply been deported without sentence. This includes from such troubled places as Aceh, West Papua, and East Timor. ");document.write("

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The one exception was a journalist who was held in West Papua for several days before being deported.

After the Bali bombing, dozens of foreign journalists worked in Indonesia on no more than the three-month short-stay visa granted upon arrival. But not one was questioned about the conflict between their visa and their work, or the formal requirement to have a journalist's visa. The question is, then, why have McCulloch and Sadler been jailed?

Aceh is a particularly sensitive issue for the TNI, as it has been unable to defeat the region's 26-year-old separatist movement. And in the US, a ban on the sale or supply of military equipment, imposed after TNI-inspired carnage in East Timor in 1999, has continued to be enforced because of human rights atrocities in Aceh.

Even during Aceh's current ceasefire (three weeks old), some 15 civilians have been murdered by the TNI. McCulloch had earlier published reports of such abuses, as well as on the TNI's legal and illegal business interests in Aceh. There is therefore little doubt the TNI was angry with McCulloch and wanted to punish her, and it repeatedly intervened with the prosecution in her case.

But, more importantly, the TNI also wanted to send a clear message to other foreign researchers and journalists who continue to expose the TNI's uglier side.

In Sadler's case, she was said to have distributed medicine to villagers. Her sentence therefore reflects a general opposition to visiting problematic places.

Related to this crackdown, senior TNI officers have recently said they will investigate the reasons each visitor goes to such places as Aceh, West Papua and Maluku, despite there being no travel bans. Almost all visitors to these places, apart from aid workers (which Sadler was, unofficially) and journalists, are academic researchers.

Yet the conditions for obtaining a formal research visa are exceptionally difficult; one needs a sponsor within Indonesia and exceptionally few are prepared to support politically sensitive research.

Further, the conditions of the standard short-term visit visa that McCulloch and Sadler were travelling under remain unclear. The official Indonesian embassy website from Canberra makes no mention of what is or is not allowed under such a visa. Indeed, the official website notes tourist destinations and facilities in Aceh and Ambon/Maluku (the West Papua tourism page is missing).

As such, the vast majority of academic researchers and short-term journalists use a short-visit visa, almost always without problem. Official policy on travel in Indonesia, then, seems to be divided between what is publicly acceptable and what is privately unacceptable.

Or, put another way, travel in Indonesia is divided between what is and what is not politically sensitive. Now the precedent for not knowing the difference, or for exploring the margins, is a jail sentence.

It is fair to say that McCulloch was not in Aceh as a conventional tourist. Her detailed knowledge of the conflict there precluded that. But it is also fair to say that the formal conditions of her visa and the status of Aceh mean that her jail sentence - and that of Sadler - is clearly predicated on political reasons.

Risking the possibility of becoming a political prisoner is the clear message being sent by Indonesia to foreigners. It is one that will continue to worry foreign academic researchers until it is altered formally.

Damien Kingsbury is head of Philosophical, Political and International Studies at Deakin University, and is the author of the forthcoming book Political Power and the Indonesian Military.

Dr Kingsbury and Dr McCulloch recently received an Australia Research Council grant to conduct a three-year survey of the TNI's business interests.